Backcountry Notes

Your author, at work on another screed for Backcountry NotesAt any point in time, I have ten or twelve Backcountry Notes articles in various states of incompletion -- hastily scrawled notes, a collection of "images," partial drafts, and so on.  The work tends to come in spates.  This summer I published a series of articles having to do with log cabins and the history of Backcountry settlement.  More recently, I have completed several articles on North Carolina pottery (there is one more almost finished, and several others on the back burner).  Partly the spates depend on what I am interested in at the time, partly they come from the need to take photographs or find digital images on-line. Of course, partly they depend on how tired I am and on whether I have spare time to work on something; there are days when it is all I can do to click the "Like" button on Facebook.

Suggestion box: One of the purposes of Backcountry Notes is to publish articles which visitors to the site enjoy or find educational or otherwise useful. So I am always open to suggestions on what you want to see.  So feel free to suggest! Topics accompanied by references to information sources are particularly appreciated.

How do I know what is popular? While I prefer to believe that my readers hang on my every word, I know that is not so, because I know what gets read the most and what gets read the least.  There's a function provided by Squarespace which compiles this information for up to 30 days at a time.  Also, I can tell what links are being clicked and what search-engine terms are bringing in readers. A lot of site visitors are coming in by way of the image-search functions available on search engines; this is one reason for creating posts which have a lot of "images." "Images" being a general term for digital files of photographs, lithographs, drawings, and the like.  Pictures.

The most-read article during the past month is Backcountry Settlers and the Winning of the American Revolution, Part 1. For about a year, that piece ran a distant second to Backcountry Settlers (etc.) Part 2, but then it surged into a lead which it continues to maintain -- I confess that I am not certain why that is
 -- and has become an exception to the usual rule that an article draws the highest number "hits" per month in the month following publication. In second place for the past 30 days: NC Art Pottery Pitchers, published this month.  Next in line is The Great Wagon Road - America's Original "Interstate Highway" and I know why -- it stays at the top in search-engine "hits." Also, before I forget, it has an interesting link -- go here and click on the link "Backcountry" to see.

At the bottom of the lists are such articles as PBS "Appalachia" Series Begins Tonight, which is dated but hasn't yet been removed -- it does draw a few hits and beggars can't be chosers -- and Rack Day IX, evidently the point where readers ceased to care about the saga of Erbitux chemotherapy.   I, myself, had lost interest at least a week before, but my attendance was required, unfortunately.